Arduino IDE now boarding for all

The Arduino IDE is heading into a rather neat consolidation of the numerous Arduino inspired boards out there. The introduction of a mechanism, in version 1.6.2, to allow people to plug their boards into the IDE easily is starting to snowball. To understand why this is important, before 1.6.2’s release if you had a custom board and the tools to make it work with the IDE, then to install them involved copying files into directories, editing files and crossing fingers (and being disappointed often). Anyone who used a lot of boards would find themselves with multiple copies of various versions of the IDE just to keep life simple.

It didn’t really register with me though that when the board manager arrived in the 1.6 version of the IDE how important this would be. Firstly, official board support can be diconnected from releases of the IDE. One of the most recent changes in the Arduino world is the adoption of the Adafruit Gemma as an Arduino board. The Gemma’s a tiny board ideal for wearables, but setting up the IDE was the same nonsense as described above. And then Arduino IDE 1.6.4 arrived with official support through the board manager.

But that wasn’t all. The officially supported boards can now be joined by unofficial board support – just enter a URL and boom – you are downloading the appropriate code for your new board. But what URLs are available you wonder. The Arduino folks give a link to unofficial board support URLs and there’s some interesting boards on there. Adafruit’s boards like the HUZZAH ESP8266*, the Ariadne bootloader for ethernet connected boards, a whole set of ATtiny boards…

And barebones Atmel controllers which means you can make and program devices for the close to the price of the chip, like the Shrimp. Oh, its an exciting time for Arduino…

*More on the HUZZAH when I get to pick some up in the US soon.**Apologies for the low number of posts… trying to fix that.